Category: Minimum Requirements - Parking Reform Network

On January 26, 2021, Berkeley City Council will consider several proposals to remove or reduce parking requirements. In the first of what we plan to be a series of Parking Reform Spotlight interviews, I spoke to Berkeley City Councilor Lori Droste about the proposals and why she wants to eliminate car parking requirements.

The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the video presented above:

Lori Droste: I don’t see how people can say that they’re climate leaders and favor parking at this point.

Tony Jordan: Hi, I’m Tony Jordan from the Parking Reform Network and that was Lori Droste city councilor in Berkeley, California. Since 2015 Lori has been working to eliminate car parking requirements in Berkeley and on January 26th city council will make their decision. I recently spoke to Lori to find out more about what they’re doing.

Lori Droste: So, we have the planning commission proposal which eliminates off-street parking minimums for all new projects except in sort of the dangerous hillside region and in areas where the road is less than 26 feet. And then we have our staff recommendation which eliminates off-street parking for new projects with 10 or more units. And then we have another council member [who] floated a different proposal.

Tony Jordan: I asked Lori how she came to propose these reductions and here’s what she had to say.

Lori Droste: I had done a lot of research around what makes housing so expensive. So I went at it actually from that point of view, about why it costs so much to live in California, and actually throughout the United States this is an issue. It didn’t make sense to me that we were mandating parking when people wouldn’t necessarily want it. So, I really sort of pushed this measure forward during a time when when people weren’t really talking about parking and how it relates to housing costs. And of course there are huge climate issues, too, that are associated with parking.

Tony Jordan: It’s common for cities to tie parking reductions to other mandates like affordable housing. Lori says this is the wrong way to frame the issue.

Lori Droste: You know that’s sort of akin to saying “all right, well you have asbestos in this building, so we’ll remove the asbestos if you give us something else.” The idea that parking is at all a net benefit is ridiculous and if people want to have parking then they need to justify why they should have parking. We see the impacts that has to our climate. We see the impacts it has to housing affordability.

So that conversation has changed a lot over the past few years whereas before it’s sort of framing it as a giveaway to a developer: “well okay, you can take away your parking but you have to give us something for it,” and now the conversation is: “this [car parking] is not good for our society, period.”

Tony Jordan: I think that Lori is right, the conversation has changed in many cities and here’s why she thinks that’s happened.

Lori Droste: So now we see a significant amount of young people coming to meetings saying there’s a connection here, there’s a connection between our housing costs which are burdened by parking. There’s a connection between climate change and parking. I think that the tenor has changed because there’s been a lot more younger people involved in our meetings and people really seeing this issue play out on our streets. Literally seeing homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk and saying: “okay we need to do something about providing homes for people as well.”

Tony Jordan: What’s Lori’s advice to other parking reformers who want to eliminate car parking mandates in their cities?

Lori Droste: Really making the connection between climate change, for instance, and parking. There’s a lot of evidence around that connecting people around housing costs and parking.

And also revenue for cities, right? Parking is dead space. So we’re able to get a lot more revenues for cities to institute or augment newer existing programs; so I think really focusing on that. Also I think the language around it needs to be clear so we’re just saying we’re not going to require you to build spaces you don’t want to build.

Tony Jordan: Lori mentioned several times in our conversation that they are proposing eliminating parking requirements not banning parking. Some of her constituents live in the Berkeley Hills, where narrow roads and windy streets combined with fire risk to pose specific hazards. She stressed that the city has been thoughtful and deliberate about the particulars of this policy and argues that reducing car parking requirements isn’t a radical thing at all.

Lori Droste: I really tried to make this a policy that can resonate with every resident of Berkeley, because it’s actually good policy. There’s this idea this is something really extreme and ideological and only for people who take the bus or who ride bikes and what I’m trying to say is it’s not. This is the future. We need to imagine how we want to create a city not for just now, when people are driving, that’s [still] true. A lot of younger people aren’t [driving now], but we have to also envision our cities in 50 and 100 years.

Tony Jordan: Berkeley city council will hear these proposals on January 26th here’s how you can weigh in.

Lori Droste: Well, I certainly would recommend writing in to council@cityofberkeley.info and saying that you support our planning commission’s proposal. That is the most progressive parking recommendation of the three and that eliminates off-street parking minimums except for those very treacherous hillside regions. We also have parking maximums on the plate as well. We have a really robust package and I think our planning commission did a really tremendous job.

Tony Jordan: I hope you found this informative. If you’d like to support more interviews like this and other resources for parking reformers join the Parking Reform Network at parkingreform.org/join.

Portland recently passed a landmark residential zoning reform eliminating “single-dwelling” zones by re-legalizing fourplexes (and below-market rate sixplexes) nearly everywhere in the city, and no parking at all is required for any of these new homes.

The Residential Infill Project was very controversial and took years of dedicated organizing to become a reality, but, astonishingly, the elimination of parking requirements came under relatively little scrutiny as the project made it’s way through the political process. At a public hearing in January, testimony mocking the cognitive dissonance of opponent’s simultaneous demands for affordable housing or tree preservation, but with ample parking for all, drew belly laughs from the Commissioners present. Surprisingly, among the amendments offered by the one Commissioner who ultimately opposed the project, there was no proposal to add parking requirements back.

Graphic description of Portland’s Residential Infill Project. Used by permission from Sightline Institute.

It seems to be true, as Mayor Ted Wheeler said at a hostile neighborhood meeting in May 2017: “The debate: Parking vs. Housing? It’s really over.” Portland planners may be more likely to open emails complaining about excess parking than too little of it. The story of how that happened goes back more than a decade, but the lessons learned can help you end the debate between parking and housing in your city.

A Few Steps Forward

Portland has a history of innovative parking reform. In the 1970s, Portland was one of a handful of cities which reduced parking requirements in their central business districts to combat air quality problems. In 1975, Portland imposed a cap on the total number of parking spaces allowed Downtown, a cap that remained in place for decades until it was replaced by maximum parking ratios.

In 2002, City Council continued to push the envelope when it eliminated minimum parking requirements for apartment buildings built within 500 feet of frequent service bus lines. But a few years later, an effort by Commissioner (and future Mayor) Sam Adams to convince merchants on Portland’s trendy Hawthorne Blvd. to accept parking meters on their street was met with serious resistance, and the plans were shelved.

A Step Back

Coming out of the Great Recession, Portland saw a development boom on SE Division St., a corridor which had been somewhat leveled in anticipation of a planned freeway in the 1970s. Mid-rise apartment buildings popped up in rapid succession on this formerly sleepy semi-industrial street and none of them had any on-site parking. Similar development was happening in a few other neighborhoods in Portland, and the people living in single-dwelling zones on nearby blocks were getting more and more angry about it.

Phone calls and angry emails flooded into Commissioner’s offices. People packed neighborhood association meetings demanding that developers build parking in these projects. The city had no effective on-street parking management solutions at the ready and, despite an op-Ed from Donald Shoup himself, in 2013, City Council re-imposed minimum parking requirements for new buildings with more than 30 apartments.

Getting Organized

At the hearing to approve the new minimum parking requirements, dozens of Portlanders testified against more car parking. Advocates had an ad-hoc email list and turned out thoughtful folks to show up at City Hall, but this effort was loosely organized and the angry neighbors had the momentum.

In 2015, Tony Jordan (the author of this article), set up a website at https://pdxshoupistas.com/ and founded a dedicated parking reform advocacy organization which would eventually be called Portlanders for Parking Reform. This group served to keep parking reformers informed about the progress of parking policy projects and opportunities to send in testimony or show up at planning commission meetings.

Lesson learned: A dedicated parking reform organization acts as a reliable press contact on parking issues. Such a group can also activate people who are sympathetic to parking reform, but not interested enough to closely follow developments at city hall.

Spreading the Word

Parking is important because it has impacts on so many aspects of city life. If someone is advocating for safer streets, climate action, abundant and affordable housing, tree preservation, active and equitable transportation, fiscal responsibility, or more vibrant business districts, then that person has a reason to support parking reforms. But, like most people, advocates for those causes have rarely considered how much parking costs, why we have so much of it, or how that relates to the issue important to them.

An example of educational materials Portlanders for Parking Reform developed to demonstrate the space parking takes from housing.`

Portland Shoupistas (later Portlanders for Parking Reform) met with leaders from these organizations like bicycle advocacy groups, tenants rights organizations, and even neighborhood associations. Educating these potential allies on the problems caused by parking requirements made it much easier to ask for their support when parking policy came back to city council.

Building a Coalition and Turning The Tide

In 2016, Portland parking reformers had another opportunity to fight parking requirements. The requirements imposed in 2013 didn’t apply to the dense Northwest Portland neighborhood, in fact, there had never been parking requirements in that part of town. Neighbors complained that this was unfair, they wanted the same requirements on buildings with 31+ apartments that applied in the rest of the city.

By this time, the housing affordability crisis affecting many American cities was hitting Portland hard and tenants around the city were organizing to fight rent increases and evictions. Portlanders for Parking Reform was able to build on the outreach to potential allies and organize critical support and testimony from tenant’s rights organizers who warned commissioners against approving any policy which would increase the cost of new housing during a housing crisis.

A crowd of parking reformers came to City Council to oppose new parking minumums.

Testimony against the new requirements was 2:1 at the hearing and the city declined to expand the requirements to NW Portland. Commissioners noted that existing parking permits in the neighborhood were “woefully underpriced” and directed the neighbors to pursue stronger parking management practices. Today the neighborhood has a mixed meter/permit zone and residential permits cost $190 per year.

Taking the Offensive

While the city was considering new requirements in NW Portland, the city was wrapping up a multi-year Comprehensive Plan process. Portlanders for Parking Reform went on the offensive, organizing testimony to ask council to repeal the new 2013 minimum parking requirements as part of that process. In response to our efforts Mayor Charlie Hales introduced an amendment to roll back the parking requirements for projects which included affordable housing.

Graphic from Portlanders for Parking Reform used to drive testimony opposing parking requirements.

Testimony in support of this amendment came from bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organizations, members of a tenant union, a coalition of housing advocates, a progressive business association, and dozens of citizens. The amendment was adopted and the parking requirements imposed in 2013 were effectively gone.

Flipping the Script

In the years since, Portland has continued to explore and develop parking reforms. The city has approved a performance pricing policy for meters, is piloting innovative market-rate permit/meter zones, and is currently considering parking surcharges for traffic congestion and a citywide parking cash-out policy. In March, transit proximity requirements for multi-family parking waivers were shelved and this spring the city granted schools and churches the right to build affordable housing on up to 50% of any existing parking mandated by their conditional use agreements.

Portland Planners can expect a few barbs from activists if they soft-pedal reforms.

Because advocates have educated and organized specifically around parking for years, there is a foundational base of citizens and organizations which can be counted on to support parking reforms and fight rollbacks of progressive policy. The script is flipped, for many Portlanders, more parking is not a positive community benefit and they’re willing to show up or write letters to oppose it.

Is your city next?

Do you want to see parking reform in your city? Whether you’re starting from scratch in a car-dependent suburb, or asking for improvements in a big city, the formula for effecting change is the same.

Educate your neighbors and advocacy organizations about the impact of parking on the issues they care about.
Form a club or organization with a communication strategy to inform those people about upcoming opportunities.
Organize, turn out testimony, pressure elected officials and bureaucrats

The Parking Reform Network exists to help you build a local organization and succeed in winning parking policy improvements in your community. Join us and support this important work!

Minimum Requirements

Parking Reform Spotlight: Lori Droste

Portland has eliminated residential parking requirements, your city should be next.